Spoiler: Technology alone can't. But it might help us ask better questions.
What happens when a university, a group of students and a local community decide to tackle a problem together?
Ideally, something interesting. Researchers bring scientific knowledge, students bring curiosity and energy, and citizens bring something academia sometimes struggles to recognise: an understanding of what actually happens outside the university.
Now imagine adding a digital platform to the mix.
Will it create a wonderful ecosystem of cooperation, scientific discovery and social innovation? Or will it become yet another website where enthusiastic people register, upload a few ideas and eventually forget their passwords?
Welcome to one of the questions behind EPiCS – Engaging Public in Citizen Science.
The platform is not the solution. It’s where the questions begin.
Universities have become increasingly interested in community engagement, citizen science and social responsibility. These are encouraging developments. But they also deserve a little scientific scepticism.
When we invite citizens to participate in research, what exactly are we inviting them to do?
Collect data for questions that scientists have already decided are important? Attend a workshop, complete a questionnaire and receive a polite thank-you email?
Or help decide which problems deserve investigation in the first place?
The difference is not trivial.
Citizen Science can expand the reach of scientific research. But involving more citizens does not automatically make science more democratic. Participation and influence are not the same thing.
A QUESTION WORTH ASKING
A thousand people collecting data is impressive. A community helping decide what knowledge is worth producing might be transformative.
From university classrooms to community questions
This is where Community Service-Learning enters the picture.
Service-Learning connects academic education with genuine community needs through collaborative activities, structured learning and critical reflection. At its best, it changes the relationship between universities and the societies around them.
The university does not simply arrive with a solution looking for a problem. Students are not dispatched into communities as enthusiastic volunteers with a deadline. And citizens are not treated merely as beneficiaries of academic generosity.
Instead, the starting point is a conversation.
What matters to this community? What knowledge already exists? What could we investigate together? And who should decide what happens next?
Building on the University of Camerino’s experience with its Service-Learning platform, EPiCS is exploring how a digital environment might help organise these encounters, connect community-defined challenges with academic learning and create opportunities for shared inquiry.
Citizen Science may provide a way to investigate certain challenges collaboratively. Digital technologies, including AI-enabled tools, may help people access resources, navigate information and reflect on their experiences.
But no algorithm can legitimately decide whose problems deserve attention or whose knowledge should count.
Those are educational, ethical and democratic questions.
Four questions every community platform should answer
Before celebrating the transformative power of digital innovation, EPiCS invites us to consider four rather uncomfortable questions.
01. Who gets to ask the questions?
If researchers define the problem, select the methods and interpret the findings, while citizens merely provide information, how much has really changed?
02. Is reciprocity real, or just a nice word?
Students may gain valuable experience and universities may publish interesting research. But what does the community receive? Who benefits, who contributes and who decides whether the collaboration has been worthwhile?
03. Who is missing from the conversation?
Digital participation can widen access, but it can also reinforce existing inequalities. Not everyone has the same digital skills, confidence, time or opportunity to participate. A platform designed for everyone may end up being used mainly by those who were already engaged.
04. What happens after we produce knowledge?
A fascinating dataset is not necessarily a meaningful community outcome. If collective research identifies a problem, can participants use that knowledge to inform decisions and action? Or does the project end with a colourful report and a group photograph?
These questions are not obstacles to innovation. They are part of designing it responsibly.
And what about community resilience?
Resilience has become one of those words that appears almost everywhere: in research proposals, European strategies, institutional speeches and, occasionally, conversations where nobody is entirely sure what it means.
For EPiCS, the interesting question is not whether a digital platform can somehow produce resilience.
It cannot.
Community resilience depends on relationships, trust, collective capabilities, access to resources and the ability to respond to challenges. These are built through social processes, not software installations.
A well-designed platform might nevertheless contribute by making collaboration easier, supporting continuity between projects and enabling different forms of knowledge to meet.
There is also a political question worth keeping in mind: strengthening community resilience should not become an excuse for transferring responsibility for structural problems from public institutions to citizens.
Communities need agency, certainly. But they also need institutions willing to listen and act.
EPiCS: a research question, not a success story (yet)
EPiCS is currently developing its platform approach. Its pilot activities have not yet been implemented, so claiming that the project has already strengthened communities would be premature.
What the project can do at this stage is establish the conditions under which such an outcome might become possible—and develop ways to test those conditions.
That requires a deliberate combination of pedagogical design, participatory governance, accessible technologies and critical evaluation.
It also requires accepting that communities might challenge the questions universities initially considered important.
Indeed, that may be a sign that the process is working.
THE REAL INNOVATION
Perhaps the real innovation is not a platform that brings citizens closer to science, but a platform that encourages science to move closer to citizens.
And if EPiCS manages to help create that relationship, the most interesting result may not be the technology itself.
It may be the conversations, collaborations and decisions that continue after everyone has logged off.
A QUESTION FOR OUR READERS
When universities collaborate with communities, who should have the final say in choosing the research questions: scientists, citizens or both?
We would love to hear your perspective.